


The Joy That You Find Here You've Borrowed

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 10000-15000 words, 10000-30000 words, Ancients, Apocalypse, Ascension, F/M, Grief, M/M, Multi, Outer Space, Present Tense, Romance, Spaceships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-22
Updated: 2007-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-03 09:45:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Ancients were the Teachers of Roads. Now all the roads are broken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Joy That You Find Here You've Borrowed

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2007 Apocalypse Kree ficathon. The prompt is the title.
> 
> This one's marked 'chose not to use archive warnings,' but I am totally fine with telling you anything you need to know in order to decide whether or not to read, just message me or comment somewhere.
> 
> Set some time after 'Unending' (_The Ark of Truth_ never happens).

> Here is where you'll always find me,  
> Always walking up and down.  
> But I left my soul behind me  
> In an old cathedral town.  
>      --Al Dubin, "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"

The only planets they had access to, before they had Goa'uld ships and homemade ships and Asgard hyperdrives, were the planets with stargates.

Now those are the only planets they don't.

They can't gate in. They can't beam down -- no protective gear they have is proof against radiation they don't even have a name for -- and the MALPs and probes they send wind up inoperative within minutes. So they scan from orbit and send down hails that are never answered. News reports, too, in case there is somebody down there and they can receive but they can't broadcast.

It's unlikely that any of them will ever walk on a world with a stargate again in their lifetime.

After the Alpha Site, the Beta Site and the Gamma Site, they're still assuming it was a strike aimed at Stargate Command specifically, and they stop looking for a rendezvous point and backup and start looking for aid. After Dakara and the Tok'ra's three last known bases, they still hold out the morbid hope that it was a strike against the old alliance, an Ori attempt to neutralize their major opponents, so they go to beg help from more neutral -- and powerful -- parties. PC3-117, P5S-381 and P7X-377 look like every other planet they've tried, and if the Nox or the Gadmeer or the giant aliens are home, nobody's answering the phone.

They stop looking for help and focus on finding survivors.

Carter and Marks generate a search grid and an itinerary so that they won't waste any more time or energy crisscrossing the galaxy. Planet after planet goes dark on the map as they find the same thing, over and over again: all life wiped out by a massive burst of radiation with the stargate at the epicenter.

It's as if the galaxy has turned into a negative of itself. An inversion, like the astronomers' images you see sometimes, black sprays of stars on a ghost-white, gray-white, frost-white field. Not _white_ white, not the white of a movie star's teeth, not the white of frothy breakers on a moonlit beach; the not-white white of afterglare, the inverted image your optic nerve keeps sending to your brain after a blinding flash.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

_Valhalla_ is the prototype for a new class of vessel, an advancement over _Daedalus_ the way _Daedalus_ was an advancement over _Prometheus_. It incorporates everything they learned from the Asgard knowledge base in the first months after the Asgard suicided. It's a Terran version of an Asgard ship.

"They named it _what_?" Daniel had said as soon as he heard. "OK, I see the effort towards homage to Norse mythology, but do they know that the word means 'hall of the slain'? Do they get that Valhalla is a place in the _afterlife_? For, you know, the _dead_?"

Her maiden voyage was a three-day trip to the Enkaran ancestral homeworld and back, to check up on the population SGC personnel had helped relocate, reestablish diplomatic relations, warn them about the Ori, and arm them with anti-Prior devices. SG-1 had given up precious personal leave to make the trip. Jack had arranged for it, and to be present for it, so that he'd be on the shakedown cruise himself and so that the original SG-1 team members would all be part of the delegation. Chronically short of resources, the SGC had failed to follow up on too many first contacts as the years went by, and it was starting to bite them in the ass. In fact, they'd spent the travel time in both directions sitting in the ship's mess and brainstorming ways to expand the SGC's infrastructure to better accommodate a diplomatic mandate.

They picked up a repeating hail from _Odyssey_ as soon as they dropped out of hyperspace in-system. _Valhalla_'s commander responded, then called Jack and SG-1 up to the bridge to relay the information in person. She was hardass military, as disciplined an officer as any branch of service had ever produced, but she faltered before she made her report, and in that moment Jack knew.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

It wasn't another weaponized Dakara device. There was too much residual gamma radiation for that. The effects were worldwide and there was a thousand-kilometer-radius radioactive hot zone around Colorado Springs despite the shielding of the Cheyenne Mountain facility. That suggested something like a massive neutron bomb, but an ERW of the size required to cause global loss of life would have blown a big chunk of North America out into space, and there would still be some survivors, somewhere, dying fast of acute radiation poisoning but not dead yet. And nothing in their understanding of electromagnetism or nuclear physics could account for the three other kinds of radiation their probes picked up after Carter rejiggered them on a hunch and before that radiation fried them.

The cause was no weapon that humans were capable of producing.

If it was an Ori strike, they had significantly changed both their MO and their objective.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Landry. Hammond. Hayes. Davis. Lam. Siler. Harriman. The custodian who made "taciturn" look chatty, the commissary crew with their practical jokes and infectious cheer. Mrs. Hodges and her attack dachshund who savaged Jack's _Wall Street Journal_ every morning he lived in Colorado Springs. The guy in the Arlington coffeeshop who was two paychecks away from that RV he had his eye on and then he was headed out to catch one fish for every river in the country. The Indiana barber whose experiences and Jack's were linked for eight years and whose name he can't even remember now.

Charlene. His wife's name is Charlene. He remembers that.

Was Charlene.

Jack's sisters and their families, Carter's brother and sister-in-law and nieces. Tessa and Kayla. Cassie.

Jack's mother, still going strong at 86, refusing to leave that rambling Minnesota house, cursing a streak about the kid who does her grocery shopping and the cleaning service and the landscaping guys and the live-in nurse and the rest of the small army of helpers Jack and his sisters mustered for her, then turning around and making them family; still reduced to tears by the sight of her baby in his class-As with stars on his shoulders.

Sara.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

With only two ships available to check on every inhabited gated planet in the galaxy, it's going to take months. There's no protocol for this, there's no more central military command, there's no more government, all contracts are null and void, but the crews of _Valhalla_ and _Odyssey_ agree fiercely and unanimously to stay the course. Jack -- the highest military and civil authority they have left -- declares the course to amount to the remainder of the search-and-rescue. (Ever optimistic, they keep calling it that, even though rescue has yet to figure in.) Once that's completed, both military and civilian personnel will be free to either find a place to settle or pledge continued service to the two-ship fleet.

_Daedalus_ has a scheduled run back to Earth in about three weeks, but could arrive sooner if Atlantis got worried when they couldn't get the SGC on the horn, or if Atlantis got hit too. Once they know whether Pegasus is an option, they can all plan a little smarter.

The ancestral Enkaran homeworld's a pretty nice place, welcoming and relatively advanced and not overpopulated. Worse comes to worst, it can accommodate a few hundred Terran refugees. Some other gateless worlds, with smaller human populations, can also support a limited number of additions, which would probably be better all around for the gene pool. The human race has half a shot at escaping extinction. Maybe.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Mitchell and Carter start sharing a cabin. Vala spends most of her time with Teal'c. Sometimes Vala and Teal'c join Mitchell and Carter. Other service personnel start bunking up in configurations that regulations would have prohibited. Jack lets it all pass without comment, as does _Valhalla_'s commander. In private, she says to him, "If that's the worst discipline problem we have to face," and he says, "Yeah," and that's it.

"You're going to have to address it at some point," Daniel says.

"My people all having wild monkey sex because the world just ended?"

That gets a smile, which is always a plus. "The organizational question."

"Maybe I will, maybe I won't." He doesn't want to think about it, much less talk about it. He doesn't want to be supreme commander of the universe. He definitely doesn't want to get embroiled in ground-up revisions of military or civil codes. For the duration of the initial crisis, he'll fight any challenge to his command, and if Stein or Marks feels it necessary to bounce some conduct problem or worse up to him, he'll use common sense and his best judgment to deal with it, and he's fine with all that. Once it stops being a crisis-response situation and becomes a matter of long-term survival ... well, he's pretty sure who everyone will look to for leadership, and the two of them are sitting right here. And inasmuch as he thinks about it, he doesn't think he likes that at all.

They're on the floor of one of the observation decks, leaning back against the sloped wall; it's more comfortable than the seating, and the low benches don't block much of their view. It's a little like lying on a hillside at home and watching the sky. They don't have much downtime. They spend most of it here, with each other.

"The alternative is having some unqualified people establishing some very bad rules," Daniel says.

"You really want to lay that responsibility on me, huh?"

"Not really." Daniel's tone is gently bantery, the tone they've been taking with each other for years, with the touch of bleakness that's crept in to almost everything anyone says to anybody. Jack doesn't need a translator to tell him that Daniel means _I'd do anything to spare you that if I could, but it's going to fall to you_, the same as Daniel doesn't need to _be_ a translator to know that Jack meant _I don't want to do it at all, but if I do it, I can't do it without you_.

He could say it now, he thinks. Say it out loud, in so many words. What Daniel means to him. What it means to him that he still has Daniel beside him in a universe that's been blasted to hell. What he hopes it means that Daniel hasn't shacked up with anybody. That it was never the Air Force, never the regs; that it was because he couldn't have done his job. That they have different jobs now. That it's all different now, but as long as they still have this, as long as this one thing stays the same in a universe of ruin and loss and danger and confusion, he can go on, and do whatever he has to do, whatever the human race requires of him.

Except he knows that it's not true. He's always been one step, one mutual declaration away from placing Daniel above all other priorities. He knows that Daniel's always been afraid of what he'd do if he had the power to do anything; sometimes he wonders if that's why Daniel fell out of heaven, nothing to do with Oma Desala or any other ascended at all ... if that was why Daniel hallucinated what he did when Shifu screwed with his head, and the lesson the dream tried to teach was to face his fears and conquer them, and he failed, and missed the point ... if that's why Daniel wouldn't use the full extent of his powers when Baal had him. Jack can understand that fear, because in a way he shares it. Because as much as it feels as though Daniel can't be any more important to him than he already is, the one thing he can't risk is having Daniel, really having Daniel, and having the fate of the galaxy in his hands at the same time. Eventually he'd have to let go of one of them to defend or shield the other.

_Forsaking all others, 'til death us do part._

"Fuck death," he says softly -- too softly for Daniel to hear, he thought, but Daniel leans into him, a tilting slide along the sloped wall, warm shoulder against his, and says, "Yeah."

They sit and watch the chiaroscuric swirl of hyperspace beyond the viewport. Jack doesn't say all the things he could have said. They'll be back here again in a few hours anyway. Maybe then, he thinks.

Daniel's not going anywhere.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

_Daedalus_ returns early.

Atlantis is gone. What happened to the gates in the Milky Way happened to the gates in Pegasus too, which means it probably happened to the gates in Ida and the gates in any other galaxies where there were gates. There are no Terran survivors in Pegasus, and there were no humanoid survivors on the gated planets that _Daedalus_ surveyed before reporting back.

_Valhalla_ and _Odyssey_ have searched for survivors in twenty-six star systems between them and come up empty twenty-six times.

Jack considers deploying _Daedalus_ to start securing the known gateless worlds, but if there are survivors on even one planet out there, their situation takes priority over potential threats to unaffected worlds, and time is of the essence.

Now they're a fleet of three.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

The anomalous radiation subsides to the point where Carter thinks it's worth risking another MALP to check out the area around one of the gates. Sacrificing a MALP, actually, because they can't risk bringing it back aboard without understanding more about the radiation it will be exposed to in addition to the radiation they can shield against. They pick the next planet where the gate is housed within a solid structure. The interior location may help provide clues that would be lost or unmeasurable around an exterior gate.

The images that come back are bewildering and downright eerie. The stargate looks melted; the walls are covered with thick gray soot that on first glance suggests some kind of explosion. This MALP lasts long enough to collect samples, perform some basic analysis and return about a terabyte of data, then craps out the way the other equipment did.

By the time they've reached the planet after that, Carter's prepared a lengthy written report. Jack doesn't ask her to bottom-line it; the bottom line is that the gate is inoperable and the planet will remain uninhabitable for decades if not centuries, and they all know that. He asks her for a verbal abstract, and braces himself. There's no more playing dumb, in this dark new world.

"With the caveat that _Valhalla_'s scientists and I are theorizing in areas outside of our specialties, we believe that something went catastrophically wrong on an extradimensional level. We've long suspected that the stargates are connected extradimensionally, all the time, in addition to the hyperdimensional connections formed when a wormhole is established between any two of them, or even between one of them and all the others at once. It's a little like the difference between a network cable you can plug into your notebook and a wireless connection that all notebooks are always communicating through. The evidence so far suggests that whatever happened affected all of the gates in the network. The presence of several varieties of what we're calling omega radiation suggests an _inter_dimensional aspect -- a burst of radiation from a universe with matter and possibly physics that differ substantially from our own."

"With you so far," Jack says. "More or less."

He hasn't gotten a flicker of real smile out of her since Earth, and now is no exception. She gives him a wan curve of lips as a courtesy, and goes on. "Sufficient energy was released in the burst to sublimate the naquadah in the gate. It looks melted, but the sooty stuff on the walls is deposition. Solid naquadah in the gate was sublimed into a gaseous state, like what you see when dry ice forms a mist, and then deposited back into a solid on the walls of that gateroom, like frost. The stargates were always sublimating to a perceptible degree -- that's what 'gate smell' is, that characteristic scent near a stargate. Even the lowest level of sublimation should have caused visible disintegration of the gates in the fifty million years since the Alterans set them up, and it hasn't. They may have been drawing replacement mass from some fuelling dimension all this time. Whatever overloaded their ability to do that is related to the radiation burst in some way that we don't understand but we hypothesize must have occurred on an interdimensional level. What happened, happened to all the gates in the network, at the same time, whether or not they were maintaining wormhole connections at the time. What happened propagated through the gate system extradimensionally, and almost instantaneously. The same burst of the same kind of radiation from all of them, whether they were 'on' or not."

"So that's the symptom," Jack says. "Sublimating naquadah, a lethal burst of neutron and gamma and whothefuckknowswhat radiation. What was the cause?"

"We'll be working on that for some time, sir. My initial suspicions point toward the ninth chevron, but I don't want to come anywhere near making an accusation like that until I've modeled some other scenarios. The precipitating event might not have occurred in our universe at all. We have a lot more number crunching to do and we can't overload the ship's mainframe. Not to mention that we may need to do a lot more on-site testing with equipment we may not be able to spare. The truth is, General, we may never be able to determine for sure what caused this."

She's in don't-pin-me-down mode, backpedaling away from something she can't support with hard data, and he needs to know what it is. She doesn't always trust her own hunches, but he does, even when they don't always pan out. "Tell me more about this ninth-chevron thing. Seven chevrons for a destination in this galaxy, eight chevrons for a destination in another galaxy, nine chevrons -- so the theory goes -- for a destination in another universe. You think somebody decided to try it?"

"There's no way to be certain, sir. I doubt any of our people would attempt something like that. Certainly no one at Stargate Command or Groom Lake. McKay and Zelenka knew better and had other things to do. I suppose it's possible that under some kind of attack they felt compelled to try it, but I don't know where they'd have gotten the energy. Nobody has the kind of energy we theorized would be required to initiate a ninth-chevron connection, no matter what it turns out to connect to."

"What kind of energy are we talking about? Two ZPMs? Three?"

She really doesn't want to answer. She doesn't _know_, and it kills her that he's pushing. "At least," she says. Then, after a moment, "Probably a lot more. Exponentially more."

"So, re-routing the energy of an entire continent, the way they did when you were stuck in the mirror universe last year ... "

"Not enough, and it's not that simple to do. Really, sir, the extrauniversal ninth-chevron theory makes more sense if it was someone there dialing in, not someone here dialing out. Incoming wormholes draw their energy from the other end."

She's got his number, he thinks. She knows where he's going with this. Maybe she agrees and maybe she doesn't, but she doesn't want to fuel his suspicions any more than he's already pushed her into doing.

He bites back what he's about to say about who paid for this particular call.

"OK," he says instead. "Keep working it, keep me updated, yadda. But just one more thing, Carter."

"Sir?"

"If we find an active gate here and _we_ can cut the connection ... "

"Both unlikely, sir. But yes. If we can shut the wormhole down from this end, it means it initiated from this end."

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

The Gadmeer were smart. As soon as they had their race reconstituted and their civilization rebuilt, they focused all their resources on re-provisioning the ship that brought them, and traded with the Asgard for hyperdrive technology so that they could send the ship out again -- this time to another galaxy. Then they built another ship, and sent it out to another galaxy. The Gadmeer believed in multiple backups.

Baal believed in multiple backups too. They're traveling in realspace to save wear on the hyperdrive, midway between the two stars of a binary system in which each star has a planet with a gate, when they stumble over his ship. The ship's a radioactive corpse, blind and dead, empty of life, drifting. They don't know if this is the last one of him, but it could be the original; intelligence suggested that he'd been directing his clones from well out of the center of the action, from a ha'tak that carried a stargate. This ha'tak very clearly carried a stargate.

It's not worth the price of Jack's life to beam over into the hot zone and spit on whatever's left on the throne, but, for more than a full second, he's tempted.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Daniel says that he dreams of the mountain, and in his dreams it's an underground cathedral, soaring not to the heavens but to the surface.

He has trouble sleeping, so he paces now while he thinks instead of sitting at his computer console. A different corridor in a different part of the ship every day. He says it helps tire him out that extra little bit he needs, that he doesn't get from his workouts in the gym.

Jack doesn't entirely believe him, but he leaves him to it.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

K'Tau. Netu. Euronda. Simarka.

The Cimmerians. The Vyans. The Pangarans. The people they liberated from Jonas Hanson on P3X-513. Eggar and the people they freed from Nirrti's genetic manipulations on P3X-367. The Argosians. Shyla's people. Tonane's people. What was left of the Volians. The people on Maybourne's planet, and Maybourne with them. The gentle symbiotic beings on PJ2-445.

The swarming firefly creatures on M4C-862 and the giant insects on BP6-3Q1. The entities of the orb from P5C-353, on the primordial world where Hammond and SG-1 had sent them so that they could start over; they'd put themselves into stasis in that orb to escape the atmosphere on their homeworld becoming toxic and uninhabitable, and Jack had tossed them through the gate to meet the fate they'd avoided at home overtaking them on their new world all the same. He doesn't know whether they'd have survived the meltdown of the gate on P5C-353, but he thinks they'd have had a hell of a better shot.

The Unas, on all three planets where Unas lived. Togar and Urgo.

Orban. The Land of Light. Cartago. The garden world of P7J-989 and the people finally living out in it, instead of in a virtual reality. The people freed from the Link on P3X-289 and finally living outside _their_ dome, their fears of a toxic world made real all over again. The domed city on the ice planet P3R-118, taken out from within instead of from below or from outside. Madrona and Latona, no one for their guardian technologies to guard anymore. Kheb, and all the Free Jaffa who had settled there, no Oma to protect them anymore, if she even could or would have protected them from this. Tegalus. Langara. Tagrea. Bedrosia. Orania. Hadante. Hebridan. Haktyl. Vis Uban.

Edora, and Jack's seven-year-old daughter.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

They spend an extra shift trying to contact Nem on Oannes. His undersea bunker might have been proof against the disaster. He might have knowledge and technology that could help them. But if he's there, he's not responding.

Harlan does respond. His gateroom is a shambles and he's barely holding his own against the problems the radiation caused in his equipment, but he's still functioning -- and he can still make copies, and will make copies, in return for a promise that some of them will stay on to help him repair the damage and maintain the place in perpetuity. They can beam straight down to a shielded area to be scanned. A MALP confirms that in the location he's provided, there's no radiation present of any kind besides visible light. That doesn't mean they're not risking exposure to extradimensional radiation they can't even measure, but it's a risk that fifty-eight members of the crew say they're willing to take.

They haven't begun to do a census of the human-inhabited gateless worlds, but excluding those indeterminate planetbound populations, between the complements of _Valhalla_, _Odyssey_ and _Daedalus_ there are six hundred and seventeen known spacefaring survivors of the human race. Their skills, and the kind of knowledge and experience that can only be passed down from living person to living person, will die with them when they die.

Jack authorizes twenty volunteers to be copied. The number of copies each of them authorizes is left up to the individual. They'll take the first batch with them. _Odyssey_ will divert to pick up a second batch and have some of their crew copied, then _Daedalus_.

Jack isn't among the volunteers. Daniel and Carter are.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

They pick up three Ori warships and their human crew complements -- pretty much pluck them out of orbit around the planets where their Priors died with everyone else. With each ship they leave a Carter (to figure out how to rig the controls to respond to someone who isn't a Prior), a psychologist (to help with the deprogramming), and two teams of Marines. They add three ships to their fleet and twenty-two hundred warm bodies to the human manifest. On the third ship they also leave Vala, because it's Tomin's ship. Her mandate is to scour the galaxy for other Ori vessels. Commandeer any that are Priorless, like these, and report the location and activity of any others. She thinks that between them, she and Tomin and the robot Carter should be able to crack any database containing information about the rest of the Ori fleet. She'll report in as soon as she's got anything.

Teal'c moves in with Mitchell and Carter.

They pick up an SOS from a Hebridan cruiser under attack. A _holiday cruiser_, of all the damn things. Long-range stardrive but no hyperdrive, set out eighteen months ago on a tour of the picturesque nebulas of the galaxy, and while they were gone the Ori happened, and the gate disaster happened, and now they're under fire from an Oranian pirate ship.

The cruiser has no weaponry, only shields, so it's pretty clear who the aggressor was even before the pirate ship calls to warn _Valhalla_ off the prize. Stein doesn't think the pirates will damage the cruiser, which they want to use or sell, but if they grapple on and get a boarding party across they might kill some Hebridans. She disables the pirate ship and sends two teams of Marines to secure it. The four pirates force a shoot-out; the Marines kill three and incapacitate a fourth. The Hebridan crew and passengers request asylum when they hear the fate of their homeworld. The passengers have a variety of skills and specialties that could be useful if they're willing to help out. Jack responds that if they'll cede command to one of his people to assist for the duration of the search-and-rescue, he'll have the shields repaired and equip the vessel with weapons. Once all the gated planets have been reconnoitred, they can discuss further arrangements. The Hebridans agree.

There are a lot of uninhabited planets with stargates where people could have settled, like P7S-441, all uninhabitable now. It doesn't matter much, because there just aren't a whole lot of people left. But humanity's still better off, with their outside shot, than those seventeen Hebridans, who may be the last of their kind.

They interrogate the Oranian. Approximately thirty-nine ships of the former Lucian Alliance are on the prowl around the galaxy, mostly small craft but fast and well armed and starting to get hungry. Odai Ventrell's been unsuccessful so far in re-forming the Alliance, but he has a ha'tak, which could be a problem down the road. The Oranian also gives up the location of some gateless kassa-producing worlds that they hadn't known about. Add a few more thousand to the human manifest, if those farmers can survive long enough in a collapsed economy to plant and harvest something that keeps people alive instead of getting them high. Add policing the galaxy to the mandate for the fledgling six-ship fleet. Seven-ship, with the cruiser, which can serve as a personnel carrier if the crew decides to stay with the fleet for the long haul. He needs to have a long talk with Mal Doran about whether to fight or subvert or tolerate the criminal fringe, or work with them. _First opportunity_, he thinks.

_Not what I signed on for_, he thinks.

They patch the Oranian up and stick him in the brig. He's got nowhere else to go anyway.

Mitchell takes charge of the cruiser. It's a tub, but hey, it's a luxury tub, and he was going stir-crazy on _Valhalla_. This'll give him some work to do, and he's the right man for the job, and _Valhalla_ can spare him. His orders are to survey the known gateless worlds and determine suitability for primary, secondary and tertiary bases.

Two days later _Odyssey_ messages that they salvaged that ha'tak, with all crew dead from what looked like an internal firefight. They don't have anybody who can fly it. _Valhalla_'s already lost two days to the refit of the Hebridan vessel; they take another day to bring Teal'c and his chosen contingent to their new ship, the fleet's eighth.

It's Netan's old ship. Sometimes what goes around comes around.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Vala reports in. They cracked their Ori vessel's data encryption and confirmed that all Prior-operated Ori ships have withdrawn from the Milky Way. They'll continue to patrol on the off chance that the data is a ruse, but they've visited about a third of the Ori-controlled worlds so far and found no Ori. Two of those worlds have no gates, and their people claim, respectively, that they've been abandoned by their saviors and freed from their terrorizers. It looks like the Ori have pulled clear out.

There's not enough left here to be worth the trouble. If they want to charge themselves up with enough worshipper-energy to destroy the Alterans, they're going to have to find worshippers somewhere else.

No one has failed to wonder whether one of the ascended Alterans went rogue and initiated the gate catastrophe in order to blow up the Ori's fuel depots. Waging all-out cosmic war against the Ori, to protect the galaxy or to protect themselves, would have required all the Others to take action together; marshaling enough energy just long enough to fuck with the ninth chevron on one gate, that would take only one.

It's crossed Jack's mind, from time to time, that the Alterans might have been assholes. Their technology is so cool that the word "Ancient" has always carried a tone of reverence. The assumption has been that humans were primitive and warmongering and the Ancients who came back to Earth did what they could to benevolently guide them without taking over and forcing everybody to make nice. The assumption has been that the Ancients allowed humanity its free will and humanity abused it. The assumption has been that the Ancients are the good-guy Alterans and the Ori are the bad-guy Alterans. But what if all of the Alterans have always been just as flawed as anybody else? No wiser, no more benign, no more enlightened, just older and more powerful. Just as capable of cruelty, negligence, ignorance, cowardice. Just as capable of fucking up. Just as inclined to cover their asses when they do.

Maybe, Jack muses sometimes, humans were perfectly nice people until the Ancients came along. Maybe the opening of _2001_ is the sugar-coated version and what really happened is some Alteran stepped out of a gate instead of an obelisk and _put_ the club in that chimp's hand and bashed another chimp over the head with it and the bashee's friends got pissed and went and got clubs of their own and the Ancient sat back and said, "How very interesting. Let's see if this trend persists for, oh, I don't know, a few million years." Maybe the teachers of roads were the teachers of conflict, too. Maybe the ones who didn't ascend were the ones who wanted to keep fucking with things, and that's why they stayed in corporeal form.

The Asgard told Jack that the Four Races had forged an alliance. They told Jack that it had taken millennia. They didn't tell Jack _why_ it had taken millennia. Or why the Nox had gone into seclusion, or why the Furlings had abandoned the galaxy. Or, ultimately, why they themselves would commit mass suicide rather than live out what was left of their lives, keep trying, keep fighting, keep hoping for a miracle until the bitter end. Maybe that's why Thor didn't want Jack to come on that mission. Maybe that's why Thor didn't say goodbye to him. Because he was afraid of the lie and what he was leaving Jack to face alone. Or because he wanted to tell Jack the truth and the other Asgard wouldn't let him.

Or maybe the ninth-chevron disaster was just some human scientist fucking with shit. God knows scientists have done enough of that, throughout history and throughout the Stargate Program, and come close enough to annihilating everything more than once along the way.

Or maybe it had nothing to do with the ninth chevron at all, and it happened because somebody in another dimension dialed a _really_ wrong number, or had a gate malfunction, or any other damn thing. Or maybe it happened because shit just happens.

And maybe they'll never know.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

At lunch in the mess one day, Daniel says, "I'm going to try to ascend."

Carter freezes midway through a swallow of cottage cheese.

The gut coldness Jack feels is from inevitability. Of course Daniel's going to try to ascend. An ascended Daniel could gather intel, find out whether the meltdown _was_ some rogue Alteran's doing. An ascended Daniel would probably gain an instant comprehension of all the physics Carter's been struggling to piece together. He remembered, when he came back the last time. He remembered the waffle house and the cosmic Oma-Anubis showdown.

_No_, Jack thinks. _No no no no no no no no no._ What he says is "Oh yeah? When?"

"After lunch," Daniel says, and polishes off the last of his meatloaf.

Carter finishes swallowing and says, "I thought you couldn't ascend again without the help of other ascended."

Daniel contemplates the remains of his meal for a few seconds, then says, "I believe that Orlin believed that. I don't believe it was the truth. I think it's what the Others told him. They may even have believed it themselves, may even still believe it. But I don't."

"Based on _what_?"

Ordinarily it's easy to flip the switch that turns on Daniel's explanation engine. Now you can see him gather himself, force himself. These are things he's really uncomfortable talking about -- personal things, like his family. Jack winces in sympathy.

"Oma led me to believe that she was helping me to achieve a higher state of spiritual and physical being," Daniel says. Still looking down at his plate, still avoiding eye contact. "But on Kheb she led me to believe that I was lighting candles with my mind, and then she led me to believe that she was the one who lit them. Which one was the trick? Half of Oma's 'teachings' were intended to make me believe in my own powers, and half of them were warnings against the hubris of thinking you have powers, and all of them were intended to run me in circles. _I_ ascended, and _I_ descended. Me." He takes a breath, pushes a four-lane tine highway through congealed gravy with his fork. "The ascended Alterans keep a lot of secrets. I think they may even keep secrets from themselves. I think they're very scared, and not very enlightened at all. Basically I think they're full of it. It's fine if they don't want to act. That's their prerogative. Fuck 'em. But I'm sick of them preventing me from acting, and I think it's way past time I tried to do something about it."

"You're not going to convince them to change, Daniel."

"Maybe not," he says. He shrugs. It looks cagey. He's not telling them everything. He's very tricky about using a lot of words to tell you pretty much nothing, or everything except what he doesn't want you to find out.

"I agree that they may not be as 'enlightened' or as beneficent as we've been assuming," Carter says, "but that means they're also a lot more dangerous, especially if you keep pestering them to do something they obviously want to avoid. They could send you back somewhere we'll never find you, with your mind completely erased this time. Or they could kill you. Really kill you, really dead. If the Ori think they can wipe out the ascended here by gathering sufficient power, then it's possible for ascended to kill each other. Maybe you think your robot copies will carry on for you. That is not good enough for me."

"I made a lot of deposits to the sperm bank," Daniel says, looking up from under his lashes with an adorable faux-shy smile that would be irresistibly winning if it reached his eyes.

"Don't try to cute me out of this. Dammit, Daniel -- " She stops, looks away. They're the only ones in the mess, it's an off hour, but the space seems to get very quiet. "I've lost enough people."

"Invaluable intel," Daniel says, a singsong wheedle.

"Fuck that," Carter says, turning and staring straight at him, hard enough that he blinks.

"OK, then. Just another mission. Any mission has risks. Risk-reward. Big rewards."

"_Fuck_ that!" Carter says. "_I'll_ figure out what happened to the gates -- that reward is not worth the risk. Maybe you could clean up one or two poisoned worlds and fix a couple of gates before the Others stopped you -- still not worth the risk. If they were willing to help they'd be helping already. The only reward worth the risk you're talking about would be if you could wave your magic ascended wand and make all of this not happen in the first place. And there's no _way_ they'll let you do that."

"Sam," he says, gently. "I believe in this. I believe I can make a difference by trying. I believe it's worth the risk. And it's my risk to take."

She stares at him for a long time. Jack's never seen her face go so cold or so hard. He's on her side, pretty much, but Daniel's hiding something, and she can't see that, and there's nothing he can do about this -- it's between the two of them. It's as if he's not even at the table.

"Then good luck," she says, finally, and gets up. "Send me a postcard this time."

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Three days, three more dead planets. Daniel's asked not to be disturbed. It nearly kills Jack to respect that, but he does. He spends three days thinking that every stray puff of air from the scrubbers is Daniel saying goodbye to him.

The evening of the third day, Daniel's back on the observation deck. Jack doesn't ask, Daniel doesn't tell. They sit close, leaning back, watching hyperspace go by.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Another Hebridan ship comes back from an extended tour. Teal'c's ha'tak picks it up on scanners at about the same time another pirate ship does, but there's no shoot-out this time; the small craft skedaddles at the first sight of the pyramid ship. Turns out there are several dozen of these Hebridan vessels out on long-range trips, which at least means that maybe the other Hebridans will have some company. Turns out this one is a scientific survey ship.

Her captain's tired and would like nothing more than to transfer over to the luxury cruiser for lighter duty. Her crew are willing to stay on and accept Carter's command until some order has been established and they can evaluate their options. Carter would like nothing more than command of a ship with specialized equipment and instrumentation that she can take directly to the places that will answer her questions. Like Mitchell and Teal'c she's technically under Jack's command, not Stein's, and they're all still observing those technicalities, so he approves the transfer.

She transports herself and an equipment payload from ship to ship in a 302 that Stein releases as part of the equipment package; the Hebridan vessel has an available hangar bay, the ship could use the extra firepower, and the Hebridans are spaceflight fanatics and should be trainable as fighter pilots. Carter will upgrade the shields and install weapons first thing, Jack suspects. He finds it strange not to know, and a relief not to be making those decisions -- the same relief as when he gave her SG-1. She left that command in favor of her scientific pursuits as much as for Cassie, and she'll leave this command when it suits her, too. But it's a good place for her.

Next stop for them is the planet where Mitchell's team got themselves bass-ackwards into a hostage situation and the upshot was that the locals buried their gate. The planet is just as devastated as all the others.

First stop for Carter, although they don't find out until the next day, is a planet with a gate in an active state, emitting omega radiation in spurts like a severed artery.

It's PT4-801, a destination listed in the Abydos cartouche but never visited through the gate and so not included in their first-tier SAR itinerary of known inhabited gated worlds. There's structural evidence of large civilization, topological evidence of significant agriculture, a parade of dead satellites in orbit, and a wormhole open to somewhere radiologically energetic.

The Hebridan science vessel can get close enough for a detailed surface scan by keeping the planet's mass between the ship and the gate -- the planet absorbs enough of the radiation to keep it from spouting out on the other side, confining it to a seeping spread through the atmosphere -- but they can't beam anybody or anything anywhere near the gate.

In lieu of the cloaking devices that are just this side of too massive and heavy for small fighters, all the _Valhalla_ X-302s were equipped with the dimensional-shifting devices Carter adapted from Merlin's design. They're energy-draining and not 100% reliable and they won't operate in hyperspace, but the one in Carter's 302 gets her safely down to the gate, untouched by the radiation. It's a suicidally insane risk that Jack would never have authorized if she'd made contact beforehand, but by damn, she pulls it off. She sets that baby down right next to the DHD, shifting back into phase for the half second she needs for the physical touchdown on the ground of the onetime park the gate's located in. Stays out of phase to hop down and stand in front of the DHD, shifts into phase for the one-point-five seconds she needs to shut the gate down, then back out of phase and back into the 302 and back up to the ship.

There's still a chance that radiation sickness could develop even from that minimal exposure. They'll know over the next few days. She's taken all the pills, all the cocktails, every possible precaution and follow-up.

After they finish listening to her report, Daniel turns to Jack. His eyes are dark and burning, the way they get when he's gone beyond rage.

"Don't say it," Jack warns.

"I'm saying it," Daniel says.

"Don't do it, Daniel."

"He or she picked a populated world that we had in our database but hadn't visited in person and so had no sympathy for or loyalty to. A world scientifically advanced enough to screw with their own stargate. A world with a huge surplus of available energy. Scapegoat after red herring."

"Dammit, Daniel."

"This was genocide. An ascended Alteran committed genocide against the human race."

"And if that's the case then the all-knowing Others know about it, and either they suspended the Prime Directive to save themselves or they're dealing with the infraction in their own way. Nothing you say or do can change that."

"I have to try."

"Then try."

"Jack ... "

"Then try, Daniel. What do you need? Why are you still here? You need my permission?"

"Maybe I do." Daniel's expression is stubborn and pained at the same time, and Jack has to look away before he answers.

"Then you have it," he says. "Request for transfer approved. Permission granted. Give 'em hell."

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Jack dreams of the mountain sometimes too. In his dreams, it's caving in on him, and all the exits are blocked. He's never told Daniel. Daniel's dream is better. In Daniel's dream, there's a way up to the surface.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

A few hours later, Jack finds him in a corridor, pacing. Jack always finds him, and he's always in a corridor, pacing.

"No luck?" Jack says.

"Do I look incorporeal to you?"

"Hey, I asked. I could have thrown a boot at you."

"It turns out your permission's not enough."

"Oh, here we go. What else?"

"You'd have to come with me."

_"What?"_

"I mean, possibly it's because I'm not dying. But I don't think so. I know that at least half of what Oma told me and Orlin told Sam was a crock of shit. I descended myself the last time, so I should be able to ascend myself this time, dying or not." He pauses. "But."

"But," Jack echoes.

He looks up at Jack, and smiles, just a little. "But."

"'But.' What does that mean, 'but'?"

Daniel's smile is mysterious and sad. "But you're my burden, Jack."

Jack doesn't say _Well, I knew that_ or _Thanks, you're a real cross to bear yourself_ or crack wise about the old ball and chain. He looks at Daniel for a long time, then says, "I'm not ascending. Even if I can. Even if I get to come back. Even for you."

"I know," Daniel says.

Jack turns and heads back to the bridge. He can still hear Daniel, pacing.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Jack goes to Daniel's quarters that night. He knows that Daniel's a lot better with the ship's systems than he lets on. He knows that Daniel knows how to key the locks. If the door opens for his handprint, he tells himself, he'll go in. If it doesn't, he won't.

He palms the lockplate, and the door opens. He wipes the lock clean of his print with a handkerchief, old habit, then takes a step in.

It's dark inside. He takes another step and palms the door closed. OK, not that dark; there's a dim glow from a chronometer in the panel by Daniel's bunk. Daniel must have set it to emit a dim glow all the time, same as he'd set it to display the largest possible numerals, so that any time he blinked awake he'd be able to orient himself to ship's time right away. And maybe so he never wakes completely in the dark.

The light's enough for Jack to see by, and bathes Daniel's neck and shoulders a ghostly blue. He's on his side, facing the bulkhead. Jack moves to the bunk and sits down where Daniel's knees will be when he stirs and straightens out of his curl and turns over.

"Daniel," he says softly.

Daniel stirs, and turns, scooching when he feels Jack right there, putting a hand up to shield his sleepy squint from the chrono glow. "Yeah," he says. No surprise, even though this is the first time Jack's been in this cabin; no attempt to come fully alert, because nothing in Jack's voice had cued him that he should. Just acknowledgment. Jack thinks he could probably say _Go back to sleep_ and Daniel would, without hesitation, without questioning what Jack was doing there.

"You're my burden too, y'know," Jack says.

"I know," Daniel says, almost exactly the same way he said it before except that his voice is thick with sleep. "Are you coming to bed?"

Jack's breath catches on the inhale, and it's like breathing in all the words he would have said, all the words he could have said and never did, maybe never will -- maybe won't ever have to, now.

"If you want sex, you're gonna have to wait 'til I wake up," Daniel says.

"OK," Jack says.

"And brush my teeth," Daniel says.

"I'm gonna have to brush your teeth?"

Daniel pulls Jack's arm around him, pulls Jack down with him as he rolls away again, back onto the side he likes to sleep on. He pulls Jack's arm tight, cuddles the forearm up into his chest, gives a scooch to fit his butt to Jack's groin.

Jack sinks into the back of him with a deep, helpless sound. Curls around him, his knees up against the backs of Daniel's, his knobby knees fitting right into the soft hollows there between the muscle of thighs and calves; his face against the back of Daniel's head, hard skull and thick soft hair; Daniel's scent rising up to him, surrounding him, filling him on every breath.

_Tell me,_ he begs, unable to move his mouth or get the words out. _Tell me this isn't what we have to do to let each other go._

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Mitchell produces a list of recommendations for base locations. They all look fine to Jack. All self-sustaining in the temperate zones, plenty of edibles and potable water, loggable, minable, not too tornado- or hurricane- or earthquake-prone, tolerable wildlife, a couple with extensive cave formations that can provide shelter and storage.

Over a long career of serving for long periods very, very far from home, Jack never suffered from homesickness, but when he's finished reading Mitchell's report, his belly feels hollow and his chest feels tight and he's gripped with a longing so bad it qualifies as pain.

The projected conclusion of the search-and-rescue moves up with every ship they add to the fleet. Eight more days now. It's been more survival inventory than SAR. Survival inventory and autopsy. When they call it, there'll be a memorial, an official day of mourning and remembrance. The closer it gets the more he dreads it.

He's been sleeping with Daniel for a week. It's everything he yearned for and everything he feared for eleven years.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

"It's the end of our story," Daniel says softly, when Jack's just a hair shy of sleep.

"What are you talking about?"

"Our story," Daniel said. "The story of the stargates. They're what brought us together. Kept us together for all those years, brought us back together every time we got separated for a while. Now they're gone. It's a whole new story now."

"Give Joseph Campbell a rest, willya? It's not a story. We're not living in a myth. This is reality."

"New heroes. New quests. New missions. A galaxy of planets connected by starship instead of one step away from each other by stargate."

"Look, Daniel. I know that you ... grieve the gate system. Honest to god, sometimes I think you grieve it more than the loss of life, but grief is grief and I know it hurts. I know."

"These ships ... this isn't my story, Jack."

"There were ships before there were gates. How do you think the Ancients got the gates set up in the first place? The gates were a tool. A beautiful, priceless tool that backfired on us and wiped most of us out in the blink of an eye. If it's a story, it's an epic tragedy. But it's not over. We go on."

"I know. That's what I'm _doing_. Going on. I just ... " Daniel winces away, turns onto his back, withdrawing.

"No," Jack says. "Stop that. C'mere. C'mon. Tell me." He hauls Daniel over and up against him, capturing him in arms and legs, vaguely bemused by how it feels like a wrestling match, the hand-to-hand skills and lifetime experience of fighting other men's bodies it takes to keep Daniel from retracting into that goddamn emotional shell. "You can tell me, Daniel. We're in here now, not out there. Tell me."

Daniel yields, but he doesn't want to be up with his face against Jack's, and when he burrows down, pressing his cheek into the center of Jack's chest, Jack's so moved that he can barely breathe. "I just hurt."

Jack strokes his head, tenderly, combing fingers through his hair. "I know. I know. Me too."

"They were the teachers of roads," Daniel says. "The people who made the gates. Now all the roads are broken."

"Different roads, that's all," Jack says. "Starlanes. Trading and shipping routes. We were grunts humping across the light-years. We're swabbies now, that's all. I hate it too. Never wanted to go Navy. Never wanted to be Captain Kirk." It's the best he can do, the best he can come up with to show Daniel that he understands how deeply ingrained gate travel was, in both of them, and how much of a blow that loss is. What everything in both of their lives had led up to, inexorably, like destiny ... gone, crumbled, vaporized. Sublimated.

"Teachers of roads," Daniel says, almost in a whisper. "Dreams teach."

"Are you falling asleep?"

"I hope not. Sleep's the only nightmare worse than waking. And it's harder work."

Jack doesn't know what to say to that, so he just strokes, just soothes. It soothes him too.

"It was supposed to be Ragnarok," Daniel says. "The Jotnar and the AEsir -- the Others and the Ori. The fate of the gods. The final apocalyptic battle. We're not supposed to be in Valhalla yet."

Jack's been aware for a long time of how much weird crap goes through Daniel's mind in the course of the average second, but this is starting to push past Daniel's ordinary level of weird.

"Hey," he says, very softly, cradling Daniel's precious head against his chest. "Daniel. Are you losing your shit? Should I be worried here?"

"No. I'm OK."

"You sure? 'Cause, I mean, I know I asked you, I know I said you can tell me anything, I'm ... grateful for the openness, OK, but ... you know you talk kinda crazy sometimes."

"I'm a genius. I'm allowed."

Jack chuckles, and it's like morphine, how good that gentle laughter feels. He hugs Daniel closer, holding him steady against the slight bouncing. "Yeah," he says. "Gotta give you that."

"I'm just thinking," Daniel says.

Jack assumes that's the prelude to more talking, as in _I'm just thinking that we should ..._ or _I'm just thinking that maybe ..._ But Daniel's quiet for so long that if not for his breathing and the lightness of his body Jack would think he'd fallen asleep, and Jack understands that it was an end on the conversation, a summary explanation of everything Daniel had said before it, and he's OK with that. Daniel does sleep badly, but Daniel does need to sleep. After a while his head gets heavier, and Jack feels safe enough to fall into a drowse, knowing Daniel's here safe with him, as safe as they can ever be in this waking nightmare, and they can both get some rest.

Then Daniel says it again, from the edge of consciousness -- "Just thinking ... " -- and where laughter had briefly warmed Jack's belly, a cold foreboding creeps in.

He spends the night holding Daniel safe through the bad dreams.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

They've taken Mitchell's first three recommendations for bases. The first will be a fleet operations and communications center for the foreseeable future, the second a general backup; the third will just have a cache of supplies, and its location will be kept deep under wraps. It looks like they won't be losing as many crew as they expected to.

Vala checked up on her homeworld, reports that they're fine, large population, not an affluent world but comfortable enough. She's connected the fleet up with a number of salvage operations, junkyards and chop shops where they can tow any totaled vessels they find and in exchange pick up all kinds of stuff to soup up their fleet. The spacefaring community never relied on planets with gates, and the infrastructure is fairly intact. It's a motley crew of crooks and swindlers and shady characters, but there's some remarkable know-how there too, and if they're handled right they could be humanity's new best friend.

One world left on their search list. They've come almost full circle back to Earth: the planet is Abydos. Some people had started to re-settle it, past couple of years. Had the city back up and running, were operating the mines on a cooperative model, farming yaphetta and a couple of other crops pretty successfully with some updated irrigation techniques. Turned out there was a galactic demand for mastadge cheese. Who knew.

Jack's pretty sure that Daniel's not going to be there for the survey.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

That night in bed, while they're getting their breath back and letting the sweat cool, Jack says, "There's something you're not telling me."

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Something about what you think you'll be able to do when you ascend."

"'When'? Not 'if'?"

Jack just looks at him, steadily. Daniel closes his eyes, sighs as though he's releasing ten weeks or ten years of tension, and says, "Tomorrow."

The word is a gut punch. Jack breathes out with it.

"So tell me," he says. "You've had something up your sleeve since you announced your intentions in the mess that day. Give me one last shot at talking you out of this."

"You want me to stay that badly."

"You are the only joy I have left in this forsaken motherfucking universe, Daniel. Yes, I want you to stay with me, that badly. But I'm also giving you a tactical assessment. Under the conditions as I understand them, you will fail to achieve your mission objective."

"I'm changing the conditions."

"OK. So, to a guy like me, that means changing the odds or changing the field of engagement or changing the rules of engagement. Which one is it?"

"The odds. By myself I don't have a hope of standing up to the Others. But me and the whole human race, that's another story."

"You think you can bring the entire human race back from the dead."

"Only the ones who were alive when the gates blew up."

"Yeah, 'cause it's not like you're overambitious or anything."

"Oma ascended the entire population of Abydos. And the Others didn't stop her."

"I hate to say this, Daniel, but don't you think it's a little _late_?"

"It's not. As long as that stuff that Sam called omega radiation is still active in the atmospheres of the affected worlds, it's not too late. I know because I've been helping a few people on every world we surveyed ascend, and I got that much understanding from them before they went where I couldn't follow. Whatever the extradimensional stuff is, it's acting like a kind of ... decay retardant, embalming fluid."

"You've been helping them," Jack says. "All this time."

Daniel gives the frowny-abstracted Professor Nod that means he wants to move past this part of the explanation to the important part. Almost dismissive, when he's talking about _life after death_. "Dreaming and ascension are very similar states, to a point where for a former ascended the dreaming state is a kind of half-ascension. Enough to reach out, the way Oma did to me. Ascension is within everyone's grasp, it's not controlled by the ascended Alterans or achievable only by older races the way they want us to believe, but sometimes there needs to be someone standing in the white light saying come on, you can do it. There's enough ascendedness still in me to do that. Be a cheering section. Plant the seed of the idea. And to be sure that they did ascend, because I couldn't follow them after that. I think they're helping each other now, but I can't be sure. The Others might have corralled the first ones already. It may not work unless it's done in masses, like Abydos." He turns to Jack, and his rapid-fire speech slows down. "I can't just hope I was some kind of Johnny Appleseed of ascension. I have been hoping, because it's taken me a while to figure out what's happening and because I couldn't ... I couldn't leave you again. Literally, at first -- I literally could not go without you. Now ... I don't want to leave you, Jack. But there are things you need to do, and you can't do them with me here, and ... there are things I need to do too. There are people I need to lead, too."

"So all those bad dreams you've been having ... "

Daniel looks away. "The way they died. It's ... "

"Yeah. OK. Yeah." Jack pulls him in, wraps him up. Yeah, it's crazy. But no crazier than any of the other hundreds of crazy things Daniel's begged him to believe over the years, and only one or two of those turned out to actually _be_ crazy. And he believes in Daniel. "Some fallen angel."

"Better to serve in hell than reign in heaven."

Daniel's planning to _marshal an army of the dead_, ascend billions of humans to outmuscle the ascended Alterans in their own territory. It _is_ Ragnarok, what he's planning, only instead of two factions of deities it's the old money versus the nouveau riche. He's going to lead another rebellion, just like on Abydos, just like in Ancient Egypt. He's going to raise a rabble and overthrow the damn aristocracy.

"'Tis a far, far better thing,' then," he says softly, and Daniel replies, "No. I'm planning to keep my head. But it's been the best of times and the worst of times." He pushes close. "This is the best of times."

"And time is running out," Jack says, tightening his arms -- crushing all that precious flesh and bone against him, cherishing every flawed, corporeal molecule of it. "God, Daniel. It was always your story. _You_ are the story."

"No," Daniel says, hot breath and moist lips against Jack's ear, his neck, his jaw, his mouth. "It's our story. It's just gotta split into a couple of separate plotlines for a little while. Until we get some stuff done that we can't do if we're holding each other back."

Jack cannot do his job on the corporeal plane, get the reconstruction off on the right foot, and be carrying on a love affair with Daniel at the same time. He needs Daniel here, Daniel needs him by his side in the cosmic uprising, and neither of them can have that, and that bites and that hurts, but it's what will free them to get the job done.

At the end of the day, like any working couple, they'll come home to each other.

"So what has all this been, then? You and me, the past two weeks?"

"It's been you and me for the past eleven years. This was an advance on the next eleven. We just borrowed a little against future happiness."

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

The next morning they shower and shave and dress. Daniel's doing most of it to be companionable, and for the last long, wet kisses and shower sex, and to pretend for just a few more minutes that it's just another ordinary postapocalyptic day. When Jack's ready to leave the cabin, a full slate of meetings ahead of him, one last dead planet to blacken on the star map, he moves to the door, palms it it open, and then turns.

They've promised not to say the word 'goodbye.'

"You know," Daniel says, "when the Alterans used the device on Dakara to re-seed life in this galaxy, they scattered the seed all over. It doesn't mean there'll be other human populations, but it means there could be a lot more sentient life out there. Not to mention races that might have evolved spontaneously, maybe even long before ours or even the Alterans'. Races and cultures that could help you. Don't stop looking, Jack, OK? When you can spare the resources, start sending ships out to look. Maybe the roads the Alterans paved were starting to limit us. Maybe the gate system was their highlighted copy of the galaxy and it's time to start reading the unabridged version. Maybe there's an opportunity here. Make the most of it, will you? No matter what happens to me, or ... everybody else."

"You're coming back, Daniel," Jack says.

Daniel smiles through his tears. "God, Jack. God, I hope so."

They both step forward, crossing the distance between them. They embrace for a long time, hanging on each other, breathing each other. Then they push to arms' length, fingers catching in a harsh, twisting grip. They let go at the same time. Jack takes a step back. Another step back. Then another, and he's beyond the cabin threshold, and he palms the lock to put a door between them, because he can't bear to watch Daniel go again, and because Daniel can't go if Jack's there.

They hold each other's gaze even after the door slides closed.

Jack waits through a full ten minutes of silence. Then he knocks -- no answer -- and palms the door open. Wipes his print off the plate, old habit. Steps into the empty cabin. Sways on his feet, bereft, swept by a wave of desolation.

Takes two steps forward and bends down to lift Daniel's clothes, article by article, to fold neatly on the foot of the cabin's bed.

&gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;

Jack's moving down the corridor, headed for the bridge to tell the ship commanders that if they'll confirm him as transitional head of operations he'll be staying on at least until they get elections sorted out, when a sweet breath of air caresses his face. He stops and closes his eyes. The soft caress dips down into his shirt, around to the back of his neck, down his arm. It touches his hand, gently, brushing over his knuckles, down his fingers, over his fingertips, then rises away.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Here is Where You'll Always Find Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/765587) by [jdjunkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdjunkie/pseuds/jdjunkie)




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